Nota Bene

The Sacramento Bee reports:

John McTiernan, director of such hit movies as “Die Hard” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” requested a withdrawal Monday of his guilty plea in a Hollywood wiretaps case.McTiernan pleaded guilty in April 2006 to making “knowingly false” statements to an FBI agent about Anthony Pellicano, the celebrity private eye he admitted hiring to wiretap a business associate.

But before his expected sentencing before a federal judge Monday, McTiernan’s attorneys filed a motion to withdraw the plea, saying the filmmaker pleaded guilty because he didn’t receive adequate legal representation at the time.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Sister Angela Escalera has lived and worked out of the Sisters of Bethany convent for more than four decades, helping the area’s poor and undocumented residents.

At 69, she expected to live out the rest of retirement at the convent. Instead, she and the other two nuns who live there will need to find a new place to call home.

According to a letter from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Santa Barbara property is being sold to help pay the bill for the church’s recent multimillion-dollar priest sex abuse settlement. The nuns have until Dec. 31 to move out, though an earlier departure “would be acceptable as well.”

The NY Times reports:

A federal judge yesterday struck down the parts of the recently revised USA Patriot Act that authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use informal secret demands called national security letters to compel companies to provide customer records.

The law allowed the F.B.I. not only to force communications companies, including telephone and Internet providers, to turn over the records without court authorization, but also to forbid the companies to tell the customers or anyone else what they had done. Under the law, enacted last year, the ability of the courts to review challenges to the ban on disclosures was quite limited.

You can read the entire text of the decision here.

Reuters reports:

An Arizona police department had the right to fire a police officer who made and sold “vulgar and indecent” sex videos in which he performs with his wife, a U.S. appeals court ruled.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Wednesday that Ronald Dible had engaged in “sleazy activities” and ruled that a lower court had properly dismissed Dible’s claims that the Chandler, Arizona, police department infringed his First Amendment rights to free speech by firing him.

Dible lost his job in 2002 after the Chandler police department learned he was running a sexually explicit Web site featuring him and wife, Megan, which they operated to make money.

You can read the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Dible v. City of Chandler here.